Academic literature on the topic 'Ward Lock, fiction'

Prehistory and Protohistory ; Sarah C. Murray, The Collapse of the Mycenaean Economy. Imports, Trade and Institutions 1300–700 BCE / Chrysanthi Gallou, Death in Mycenaean Laconia. A Silent Place /James C. Wright and Mary K. Dabney (with contributions by Phoebe Acheson, Susan F. Allen, Kathleen M. Forster, Paul Halstead, S.M.A. Hoffman, Anna Karabatsoli, Konstantina Kaza-Papageorgiou, Bartłomiej Lis, Rebecca Mersereau, Hans Mommsen, Jeremy B. Rutter, Tatiana Theodoropoulou, and Jonathan E. Tomlinson), The Mycenaean Settlement on Tsoungiza Hill (Nemea Valley Archaeological Project III) – Oliver Dickinson ; Gioulika-Olga Christakopoulou, To Die in Style! The Residential Lifestyle of Feasting and Dying in Iron Age Stamna, Greece – John Bintliff ; Archaic to Hellenistic ; Oliver Hülden, Das griechische Befestigungswesen der archaïschen Zeit. Entwicklungen – Formen – Funktionen – Hans Lohmann ; Peter van Alfen and Ute Wartenberg (eds) (with Wolfgang Fischer-Bossert, Haim Gitler, Koray Konuk, and Catharine C. Lorber), White Gold: Studies in Early Electrum Coinage – Keith Rutter ; Marta González González, Funerary Epigrams of Ancient Greece: Reflections on Literature, Society and Religion – Fabienne Marchand ; Robert S. Wagman, The Cave of the Nymphs at Pharsalus. Studies on a Thessalian Country Shrine – Maria Mili ; Natascha Sojc (ed.), Akragas. Current Issues in the Archaeology of a Sicilian Polis – Johannes Bergemann ; Roman to Late Roman ; Laura Pfuntner, Urbanism and Empire in Roman Sicily. – Michalis Karambinis ; Walter Scheidel, Escape from Rome. The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity – Bryan Ward-Perkins ; Rinse Willet, The Geography of Urbanism in Roman Asia Minor – Mark P.C. Jackson ; Medieval to Postmedieval ; Charalambos Bouras, Byzantine Athens, 10th-12th Centuries / Nickephoros I. Tsougarakis and Peter Lock (eds), A Companion to Latin Greece / Joanita Vroom (ed.), Medieval and Post-Medieval Ceramics in the Eastern Mediterranean - Fact and Fiction. / Joanita Vroom, Yona Waksman and Roos van Oosten (eds), Medieval Masterchef. Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on Eastern Cuisine and Western Foodways – John Bintliff ; Multiperiod ; María-Paz de Hoz, Juan Luis García Alonso and Luis Arturo Guichard Romero (eds), Greek paideia and local tradition in the Graeco-Roman east – Dorothea Stavrou ; John Ellis Jones and Ourania Kouka, Elis 1969. The Peneios Valley Rescue Excavation Project: British School at Athens Survey 1967 and Rescue Excavations at Kostoureika and Keramidia 1969 / Effie Photos-Jones and Alan J Hall, Eros, mercator and the cultural landscape of Melos in antiquity: The archaeology of the minerals industry of Melos – John Bintliff ; Bleda S. Düring and Claudia Glatz (eds), Kinetic Landscapes, the Cide Archaeological Project: Surveying the Turkish Western Black Sea Coast – James Crow ; J. Rasmus Brandt, Erika Hagelberg, Gro Bjørnstad and Sven Ahrens (eds), Life and Death in Asia Minor in Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine Times: Studies in Archaeology and Bioarchaeology – Willem M. Jongman ; Caroline Arnould-Béhar and Véronique Vassal (eds), Art et archéologie du Proche-Orient hellénistique et romain. Les circulations artistiques entre Orient et Occident Vol.1 / Caroline Arnould-Béhar and Véronique Vassal (eds), Art et archéologie du Proche-Orient hellénistique et romain. Les circulations artistiques entre Orient et Occident Vol. 2 – Andrew Erskine ; Historiography and Theory ; John Boardman, A Classical Archaeologist’s Life: The Story So Far. An Autobiography – Robin Osborne

In 1999, the TV movie Shark Attack depicted an attack by mutant great white sharks on the population of Cape Town. By the time the third entry in the series, Shark Attack 3, aired in 2002, mutant great whites had lost their lustre and were replaced as antagonists with the megalodon: a giant shark originating not in any laboratory, but history, having lived from approximately 23 to 3.6 million years ago. The megalodon was resurrected again in May 2021 through a trifecta of events. A video of a basking shark encounter in the Atlantic went viral on the social media platform TikTok, due to users misidentifying it as a megalodon caught on tape. At the same time a boy received publicity for finding a megalodon tooth on a beach in South Carolina on his fifth birthday (Scott). And finally, the video game Stranded Deep, in which a megalodon is featured as a major enemy, was released as one of the monthly free games on the PlayStation Plus gaming service. These examples form part of a larger trend of alleged megalodon sightings in recent years, emerging as a component of the modern resurgence of cryptozoology. In the words of Bernard Heuvelmans, the Belgian zoologist who both popularised the term and was a leading figure of the field, cryptozoology is the “science of hidden animals”, which he further explained were more generally referred to as ‘unknowns’, even though they are typically known to local populations—at least sufficiently so that we often indirectly know of their existence, and certain aspects of their appearance and behaviour. It would be better to call them animals ‘undescribed by science,’ at least according to prescribed zoological rules. (1-2) In other words, a large aspect of cryptozoology as a field is taking the legendary creatures of non-Western mythology and finding materialist explanations for them compatible with Western biology. In many ways, this is a relic of the era of European imperialism, when many creatures of Africa and the Americas were “hidden animals” to European eyes (Dendle 200-01; Flores 557; Guimont). A major example of this is Bigfoot beliefs, a large subset of which took Native American legends about hairy wild men and attempted to prove that they were actually sightings of relict Gigantopithecus. These “hidden animals”—Bigfoot, Nessie, the chupacabra, the glawackus—are referred to as ‘cryptids’ by cryptozoologists (Regal 22, 81-104). Almost unique in cryptozoology, the megalodon is a cryptid based entirely on Western scientific development, and even the notion that it survives comes from standard scientific analysis (albeit analysis which was later superseded). Much like living mammoths and Bigfoot, what might be called the ‘megalodon as cryptid hypothesis’ serves to reinforce a fairy tale of its own. It reflects the desire to believe that there are still areas of the Earth untouched enough by human destruction to sustain massive animal life (Dendle 199-200). Indeed, megalodon’s continued existence would help absolve humanity for the oceanic aspect of the Sixth Extinction, by its role as an alternative apex predator; cryptozoologist Michael Goss even proposed that whales and giant squids are rare not from human causes, but precisely because megalodons are feeding on them (40). Horror scholar Michael Fuchs has pointed out that shark media, particularly the 1975 film Jaws and its 2006 video game adaptation Jaws Unleashed, are imbued with eco-politics (Fuchs 172-83). These connections, as well as the modern megalodon’s surge in popularity, make it notable that none of Syfy’s climate change-focused Sharknado films featured a megalodon. Despite the lack of a Megalodonado, the popular appeal of the megalodon serves as an important case study. Given its scientific origin and dynamic relationship with popular culture, I argue that the ‘megalodon as cryptid hypothesis’ illustrates how the boundaries between ‘hard’ science and mythology, fiction and reality, as well as ‘monster’ and ‘animal’, are not as firm as advocates of the Western science tradition might believe. As this essay highlights, science can be a mythology of its own, and monsters can serve as its gods of the gaps—or, in the case of megalodon, the god of the depths. Megalodon Fossils: A Short History Ancient peoples of various cultures likely viewed fossilised teeth of megalodons in the area of modern-day Syria (Mayor, First Fossil Hunters 257). Over the past 2500 years, Native American cultures in North America used megalodon teeth both as curios and cutting tools, due to their large size and serrated edges. A substantial trade in megalodon teeth fossils existed between the cultures inhabiting the areas of the Chesapeake Bay and Ohio River Valley (Lowery et al. 93-108). A 1961 study found megalodon teeth present as offerings in pre-Columbian temples across Central America, including in the Mayan city of Palenque in Mexico and Sitio Conte in Panama (de Borhegyi 273-96). But these cases led to no mythologies incorporating megalodons, in contrast to examples such as the Unktehi, a Sioux water monster of myth likely inspired by a combination of mammoth and mosasaur fossils (Mayor, First Americans 221-38). In early modern Europe, megalodon teeth were initially referred to as ‘tongue stones’, due to their similarity in size and shape to human tongues—just one of many ways modern cryptozoology comes from European religious and mystical thought (Dendle 190-216). In 1605, English scholar Richard Verstegan published his book A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities, which included an engraving of a tongue stone, making megalodon teeth potentially the subject of the first known illustration of any fossil (Davidson 333). In Malta, from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, megalodon teeth, known as ‘St. Paul’s tongue’, were used as charms to ward off the evil eye, dipped into drinks suspected of being poisoned, and even ground into powder and consumed as medicine (Zammit-Maempel, “Evil Eye” plate III; Zammit-Maempel, “Handbills” 220; Freller 31-32). While megalodon teeth were valued in and of themselves, they were not incorporated into myths, or led to a belief in megalodons still being extant. Indeed, save for their size, megalodon teeth were hard to distinguish from those of living sharks, like great whites. Instead, both the identification of megalodons as a species, and the idea that they might still be alive, were notions which originated from extrapolations of the results of nineteenth and twentieth century European scientific studies. In particular, the major culprit was the famous British 1872-76 HMS Challenger expedition, which led to the establishment of oceanography as a branch of science. In 1873, Challenger recovered fossilised megalodon teeth from the South Pacific, the first recovered in the open ocean (Shuker 48; Goss 35; Roesch). In 1959, the zoologist Wladimir Tschernezky of Queen Mary College analysed the teeth recovered by the Challenger and argued (erroneously, as later seen) that the accumulation of manganese dioxide on its surface indicated that one had to have been deposited within the last 11,000 years, while another was given an age of 24,000 years (1331-32). However, these views have more recently been debunked, with megalodon extinction occurring over two million years ago at the absolute latest (Pimiento and Clements 1-5; Coleman and Huyghe 138; Roesch). Tschernezky’s 1959 claim that megalodons still existed as of 9000 BCE was followed by the 1963 book Sharks and Rays of Australian Seas, a posthumous publication by ichthyologist David George Stead. Stead recounted a story told to him in 1918 by fishermen in Port Stephens, New South Wales, of an encounter with a fully white shark in the 115-300 foot range, which Stead argued was a living megalodon. That this account came from Stead was notable as he held a PhD in biology, had founded the Wildlife Preservation Society of Australia, and had debunked an earlier supposed sea monster sighting in Sydney Harbor in 1907 (45-46). The Stead account formed the backbone of cryptozoological claims for the continued existence of the megalodon, and after the book’s publication, multiple reports of giant shark sightings in the Pacific from the 1920s and 1930s were retroactively associated with relict megalodons (Shuker 43, 49; Coleman and Huyghe 139-40; Goss 40-41; Roesch). A Monster of Science and Culture As I have outlined above, the ‘megalodon as cryptid hypothesis’ had as its origin story not in Native American or African myth, but Western science: the Challenger Expedition, a London zoologist, and an Australian ichthyologist. Nor was the idea of a living megalodon necessarily outlandish; in the decades after the Challenger Expedition, a number of supposedly extinct fish species had been discovered to be anything but. In the late 1800s, the goblin shark and frilled shark, both considered ‘living fossils’, had been found in the Pacific (Goss 34-35). In 1938, the coelacanth, also believed by Western naturalists to have been extinct for millions of years, was rediscovered (at least by Europeans) in South Africa, samples having occasionally been caught by local fishermen for centuries. The coelacanth in particular helped give scientific legitimacy to the idea, prevalent for decades by that point, that living dinosaurs—associated with a legendary creature called the mokele-mbembe—might still exist in the heart of Central Africa (Guimont). In 1976, a US Navy ship off Hawaii recovered a megamouth shark, a deep-water species completely unknown prior. All of these oceanic discoveries gave credence to the idea that the megalodon might also still survive (Coleman and Clark 66-68, 156-57; Shuker 41; Goss 35; Roesch). Indeed, Goss has noted that prior to 1938, respectable ichthyologists were more likely to believe in the continued existence of the megalodon than the coelacanth (39-40). Of course, the major reason why speculation over megalodon survival had such public resonance was completely unscientific: the already-entrenched fascination with the fact that it had been a locomotive-sized killer. This had most clearly been driven home by a 1909 display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. There, Bashford Dean, an ichthyologist at the museum, reconstructed an immense megalodon jaw, complete with actual fossil teeth. However, due to the fact that Dean assumed that all megalodon teeth were approximately the same size as the largest examples medially in the jaws, Dean’s jaw was at least one third larger than the likely upper limit of megalodon size. Nevertheless, the public perception of the megalodon remained at the 80-foot length that Dean extrapolated, rather than the more realistic 55-foot length that was the likely approximate upper size (Randall 170; Shuker 47; Goss 36-39). In particular, this inaccurate size estimate became entrenched in public thought due to a famous photograph of Dean and other museum officials posing inside his reconstructed jaw—a photograph which appeared in perhaps the most famous piece of shark fiction of all time, Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film Jaws. As it would turn out, the megalodon connection was itself a relic from the movie’s evolutionary ancestor, Peter Benchley’s novel, Jaws, from the year before. In the novel, the Woods Hole ichthyologist Matt Hooper (played by Richard Dreyfuss in the film) proposes that megalodons not only still exist, but they are the same species as great white sharks, with the smaller size of traditional great whites being due to the fact that they are simply on the small end of the megalodon size range (257-59). Benchley was reflecting on what was then the contemporary idea that megalodons likely resembled scaled-up great white sharks; something which is no longer as accepted. This was particularly notable as a number of claimed sightings stated that the alleged megalodons were larger great whites (Shuker 48-49), perhaps circuitously due to the Jaws influence. However, Goss was apparently unaware of Benchley’s linkage when he noted in 1987 (incidentally the year of the fourth and final Jaws movie) that to a megalodon, “the great white shark of Jaws would have been a stripling and perhaps a between-meals snack” (36). The publication of the Jaws novel led to an increased interest in the megalodon amongst cryptozoologists (Coleman and Clark 154; Mullis, “Cryptofiction” 246). But even so, it attracted rather less attention than other cryptids. From 1982-98, Heuvelmans served as president of the International Society of Cryptozoology, whose official journal was simply titled Cryptozoology. The notion of megalodon survival was addressed only once in its pages, and that as a brief mention in a letter to the editor (Raynal 112). This was in stark contrast to the oft-discussed potential for dinosaurs, mammoths, and Neanderthals to remain alive in the present day. In 1991, prominent British cryptozoologist Karl Shuker published an article endorsing the idea of extant megalodons (46-49). But this was followed by a 1998 article by Ben S. Roesch in The Cryptozoology Review severely criticising the methodology of Shuker and others who believed in the megalodon’s existence (Roesch). Writing in 1999, Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark, arguably the most prominent post-Heuvelmans cryptozoologists, were agnostic on the megalodon’s survival (155). The British palaeozoologist Darren Naish, a critic of cryptozoology, has pointed out that even if Shuker and others are correct and the megalodon continues to live in deep sea crevasses, it would be distinct enough from the historical surface-dwelling megalodon to be a separate species, to which he gave the hypothetical classification Carcharocles modernicus (Naish). And even the public fascination with the megalodon has its limits: at a 24 June 2004 auction in New York City, a set of megalodon jaws went on sale for $400,000, but were left unpurchased (Couzin 174). New Mythologies The ‘megalodon as cryptid hypothesis’ is effectively a fairy tale born of the blending of science, mythology, and most importantly, fiction. Beyond Jaws or Shark Attack 3—and potentially having inspired the latter (Weinberg)—perhaps the key patient zero of megalodon fiction is Steve Alten’s 1997 novel Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror, which went through a tortuous development adaptation process to become the 2018 film The Meg (Mullis, “Journey” 291-95). In the novel, the USS Nautilus, the US Navy’s first nuclear submarine and now a museum ship in Connecticut, is relaunched in order to hunt down the megalodon, only to be chomped in half by the shark. This is a clear allusion to Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1870), where his Nautilus (namesake of the real submarine) is less successfully attacked by a giant cuttlefish (Alten, Meg 198; Verne 309-17). Meanwhile, in Alten’s 1999 sequel The Trench, an industrialist’s attempts to study the megalodon are revealed as an excuse to mine helium-3 from the seafloor to build fusion reactors, a plot financed by none other than a pre-9/11 Osama bin Laden in order to allow the Saudis to take over the global economy, in the process linking the megalodon with a monster of an entirely different type (Alten, Trench 261-62). In most adaptations of Verne’s novel, the cuttlefish that attacks the Nautilus is replaced by a giant squid, traditionally seen as the basis for the kraken of Norse myth (Thone 191). The kraken/giant squid dichotomy is present in the video game Stranded Deep. In it, the player’s unnamed avatar is a businessman whose plane crashes into a tropical sea, and must survive by scavenging resources, crafting shelters, and fighting predators across various islands. Which sea in particular does the player crash into? It is hard to say, as the only indication of specific location comes from the three ‘boss’ creatures the player must fight. One of them is Abaia, a creature from Melanesian mythology; another is Lusca, a creature from Caribbean mythology; the third is a megalodon. Lusca and Abaia, despite being creatures of mythology, are depicted as a giant squid and a giant moray eel, respectively. But the megalodon is portrayed as itself. Stranded Deep serves as a perfect distillation of the megalodon mythos: the shark is its own mythological basis, and its own cryptid equivalent. References Alten, Steven. Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror. New York: Doubleday, 1997. Alten, Steven. The Trench. New York: Pinnacle Books, 1999. Atherton, Darren. Jaws Unleashed. Videogame. Hungary: Appaloosa Interactive, 2006. Benchley, Peter. Jaws: A Novel. New York: Doubleday, 1974. Coleman, Loren, and Jerome Clark. Cryptozoology A to Z: The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters, Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999. Coleman, Loren, and Patrick Huyghe. The Field Guide to Lake Monsters, Sea Serpents, and Other Mystery Denizens of the Deep. Los Angeles: TarcherPerigee, 2003. Couzin, Jennifer. “Random Samples.” Science 305.5681 (2004): 174. Davidson, Jane P. “Fish Tales: Attributing the First Illustration of a Fossil Shark’s Tooth to Richard Verstegan (1605) and Nicolas Steno (1667).” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 150 (2000): 329–44. De Borhegyi, Stephan F. “Shark Teeth, Stingray Spines, and Shark Fishing in Ancient Mexico and Central America.” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 17.3 (1961): 273–96. Dendle, Peter. “Cryptozoology in the Medieval and Modern Worlds.” Folklore 117.2 (2006): 190–206. Flores, Jorge, “Distant Wonders: The Strange and the Marvelous between Mughal India and Habsburg Iberia in the Early Seventeenth Century.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 49.3 (2007): 553–81. Freller, Thomas. “The Pauline Cult in Malta and the Movement of the Counter-Reformation: The Development of Its International Reputation.” The Catholic Historical Review 85.1 (1999): 15–34. Fuchs, Michael. “Becoming-Shark? Jaws Unleashed, the Animal Avatar, and Popular Culture’s Eco-Politics.” Beasts of the Deep: Sea Creatures and Popular Culture. Jon Hackett and Seán Harrington. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2018. 172–83. Goss, Michael. “Do Giant Prehistoric Sharks Survive?” Fate 40.11 (1987): 32–41. Guimont, Edward. “Hunting Dinosaurs in Central Africa.” Contingent Magazine, 18 Mar. 2019. 26 May 2021 <http://contingentmagazine.org/2019/03/18/hunting-dinosaurs-africa/>. Heuvelmans, Bernard. “What is Cryptozoology?” Trans. Ron Westrum. Cryptozoology 1 (1982): 1–12. Jaws. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Universal Pictures, 1975. Lowery, Darrin, Stephen J. Godfrey, and Ralph Eshelman. “Integrated Geology, Paleontology, and Archaeology: Native American Use of Fossil Shark Teeth in the Chesapeake Bay Region.” Archaeology of Eastern North America 39 (2011): 93–108. Mayor, Adrienne. The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Mayor, Adrienne. Fossil Legends of the First Americans. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005. Meg, The. Dir. Jon Turteltaub. Warner Brothers, 2018. Mullis, Justin. “Cryptofiction! Science Fiction and the Rise of Cryptozoology.” The Paranormal and Popular Culture: A Postmodern Religious Landscape. Eds. Darryl Caterine and John W. Morehead. London: Routledge, 2019. 240–52. Mullis, Justin. “The Meg’s Long Journey to the Big Screen.” Jaws Unmade: The Lost Sequels, Prequels, Remakes, and Rip-Offs. John LeMay. Roswell: Bicep Books, 2020. 291–95. Naish, Darren. “Tales from the Cryptozoologicon: Megalodon!” Scientific American, 5 Aug. 2013. 27 May 2021 <https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/cryptozoologicon-megalodon-teaser/>. Pimiento, Catalina, and Christopher F. Clements. “When Did Carcharocles Megalodon Become Extinct? A New Analysis of the Fossil Record.” PLoS One 9.10 (2014): 1–5. Randall, John E. “Size of the Great White Shark (Carcharodon).” Science 181.4095 (1973): 169–70. Raynal, Michel. “The Linnaeus of the Zoology of Tomorrow.” Cryptozoology 6 (1987): 110–15. Regal, Brian. Searching for Sasquatch: Crackpots, Eggheads, and Cryptozoology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Roesch, Ben S. “A Critical Evaluation of the Supposed Contemporary Existence of Carcharodon Megalodon.” Internet Archive, 1999. 28 May 2021 <https://web.archive.org/web/20131021005820/http:/web.ncf.ca/bz050/megalodon.html>. Scott, Ryan. “TikTok of Giant Shark Terrorizing Tourists Ignites Megalodon Theories.” Movieweb, 27 May 2021. 28 May 2021 <https://movieweb.com/giant-shark-tiktok-video-megalodon/>. Shark Attack. Dir. Bob Misiorowski. Martien Holdings A.V.V., 1999. Shark Attack 3: Megalodon. Dir. David Worth. Nu Image Films, 2002. Shuker, Karl P.N. “The Search for Monster Sharks.” Fate 44.3 (1991): 41–49. Stead, David G. Sharks and Rays of Australian Seas. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1963. Stranded Deep. Australia: Beam Team Games, 2015. Thone, Frank. “Nature Ramblings: Leviathan and the Kraken.” The Science News-Letter 33.12 (1938): 191. Tschernezky, Wladimir. “Age of Carcharodon Megalodon?” Nature 184.4695 (1959): 1331–32. Verne, Jules. Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. 1870. New York: M. A. Donohue & Company, 1895. Weinberg, Scott. “Shark Attack 3: Megalodon.” eFilmCritic! 3 May 2004. 20 Sep. 2021 <https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=9135&reviewer=128>. Zammit-Maempel, George. “The Evil Eye and Protective Cattle Horns in Malta.” Folklore 79.1 (1968): 1–16. ———. “Handbills Extolling the Virtues of Fossil Shark’s Teeth.” Melita Historica 7.3 (1978): 211–24.

Abstract As he sat there thinking, he began in an absent-minded way to look at his evening paper. He read the news on the front page, then turned to the inner sheets. His eye fell on these words printed at the head of the column next to the leading article: To the Women of the Empire. Thoughts in War-Time. By Pearl Bellairs.’ Underneath in brackets: ‘The first of a series of inspiring and patriotic articles by Miss Bellairs, the well-known novelist.’ Dick groaned in agony ... ‘Inspiring and patriotic’: those were feeble words in which to describe Pearl’s shrilly raucous chauvinism. And the style! Christ! ... She was a public danger. It was all too frightful. (Aldous Huxley, ‘Farcical History of Richard Greenow’). Aldous Huxley’s ‘Farcical History of Richard Greenow’ (1920) is a satirical account of the life and death of a young Englishman in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Dick Greenow’s outstanding academic promise first becomes evident at preparatory school when he devours all three volumes of Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere (‘No length or incomprehensibility could put him off’). After studying at Aesop College (Eton), Dick goes on to read Classics at Canteloup College, Oxford, where he becomes a leading light of the Fabian Society. But at Oxford, a strange psychological disorder, first apparent at Aesop, begins to take over his life.

Abstract This chapter contributes to the ongoing debates about realism’s efficacy to textualize environmental and other catastrophes at the present time. While Amitav Ghosh (among others) has announced the demise of realism, by using Absent, Betool Khedairi’s 2004 novel about the Iraq wars as an exemplary instance, the author argues for a need to look beyond familiar textual archives to properly assess the vitality and importance of realism. Set in the context of the US invasion of and subsequent war with Iraq, Khedairi catalogues the profound costs—to city, ecology, sociality, and body—of relentless and indiscriminate bombings and prolonged sanctions. The novel provides a counternarrative to the representational density engineered by Western media of a war being conducted via “smart bombs” and “surgical strikes,” which implied a war causing minimal damage. Khedairi challenges such obfuscatory language with a strategic realism that meticulously indexes the everyday destruction of a country and a culture. Realism in Khedairi’s novel remains—to borrow an apt description from Fredric Jameson—“an active, curious, experimental, subversive” form.

Abstract What kind of woman calls her own red hair scarlet? One who was not shy of the limelight, by all accounts. Asking us to look at her, even before she invites us to look with her, to join her in thinking again about the question of women, the voice of Mary Butts echoes imperiously still today. A brilliant, even ferocious intelligence, a demanding voice: there are no anodyne terms to present her in. And if you look to find her among her friends, you will not find them organizing to work together for the vote or exploring the extended options opened to women by the war. It is in the memories of men that the sense of her as a person survived, a big eager lawless redhead, on the lookout for excitement and parties. ‘Paris was a dream. We didn’t go to bed for a week and spent all our money on such binges! The last thing I remember was dancing solely supporting myself by the lobes of Cedric Morris’ ears,’ she wrote to Douglas Goldring. She is the hardest figure to recruit for any cause. In her own person she throws the regular terms of enquiry into disarray. Mary Butts was a woman who hated her own mother and though she gave birth to a daughter, Camilla, did not bring the child up herself. No one could say she was not a difficult woman, in almost any sense you care to name. When Patrick Wright brought her writing back to public attention in 1985, it was primarily to expose its enthusiastic rhetoric of blood and race.

Abstract Discovered by Spade, Joel Cairo’s three passports—Greek, French, and British—suggest the character’s connections to nineteenth-century fiction, when the burgeoning European metropolises of London and Paris had begun to render every identity suspect (see Balzac and Dickens). Cairo, of course, is a crook, and his proliferating passports merely fill in that portrait. Determining his origins, imagine the hermetically sealed space of The Maltese Falcon as one large theatrical set, the Swing Your Lady poster seems like a door in the stage’s rear wall, suddenly flung open to reveal the actual world. The very lack of attention accorded the poster achieves another effect. As Barthes points out, when real historical characters (or objects) get introduced into a fiction obliquely, in passing, “their modesty, like a lock between two levels of water, equalizes novel and history.” After The Maltese Falcon’s success, Warners would exploit such “locks,” casting Bogart in a series of World War II adventures (Across the Pacific, Casablanca, Action in the North Atlantic, Sahara, Passage to Marseilles, To Have and Have Not), the first of which, 1942’s Across the Pacific, concerns the Panama Canal.

Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware recasts The Scarlet Letter as a Methodist minister’s romance with Catholics and fin-de-siècle intellectual Catholicism. The Reverend Theron Ware is a liberal progressive Dimmesdale update, happily married at the novel’s outset, who is assigned to a fundamentalist, anti-Catholic congregation yet comes increasingly under the spell of a trio of erudite, somewhat unorthodox Catholic leaders—one of whom, Celia Madden, the Hester Prynne update, is a single woman, seemingly independent yet Church-integrated, whose mastery of the organ and articulation of Continental aesthetics are all too provocative to be ignored. The resultant interplay between Theron’s late-century Protestant dissipation and the edgy Catholicism of Celia and her erudite comrades (one priest, one scientist) is lit in knowing commentary—religious anthropology cum wicked irony—that hangs in the air long after Theron’s hurtful sexploration comes to its merciful—mercy-filled, Angel-conducted—end. In The Damnation of Theron Ware, the Catholic-inspired, Catholic-tutored mythopoetics of Protestant self-consciousness take a mighty leap forward, in seeming lock-step with Henry Adams and in anticipation of such contemporary thinkers as Richard Rodriguez, Camille Paglia, and James T. Fisher. Religious wanderlust is seen to drive forbidden love at least as much as the original way around. And the narrative staging of Protestant wonderment and wanderlust, dramatized in terms of the Protestant-side tangle between its persisting Calvinism and emergent liberal pragmatism, takes a nasty 180-degree turn against itself, courtesy of its Catholic protagonists—though, really, of its Protestant author.

Abstract In Richard Aldington’s 1929 Death of a Hero, George Winterbourne sees troops returning from leave and muses: ‘These men were men ... They had been where no woman and no half-man had ever been, could endure to be.’ This notion that the front, where the ‘real’ business of war was carried out, was no place for a woman left many women feeling that they had no place in the war. Sandra Gilbert has suggested that women were liberated by the widespread absence of men from their domestic and working lives, although she does point out that as well as their ‘sexual glee’ women felt intense anxiety and guilt at having got what they wanted at so many men’s expense. But despite the government’s efforts to recast the roles of mother, wife, and indeed of ‘woman’ in the mould of war, women seem to have remained confused and uneasy, afraid of doing things wrong, but unsure how to do things right. For many women, especially older women who had no children to look after, and were beyond the age where they could be recruited for war service, the war heightened their feelings of uselessness. As Gilbert and Gubar see it, women felt curiously free, and so curiously unnecessary. Women like May Sinclair, already 51 when the war broke out, struggled to make a place for themselves in a world that was preoccupied with the vulnerability of young men, rather than of older women. Her war journals reveal in painful and awkward detail the shame of a middle-aged woman who sees in middle age her last chance at life.

The Cold War and the nuclear threat made it as difficult, after 1945, to look forward affirmatively as to look back. Enlightenment ideas of a ‘project of modernity’ gave way to postmodern scepticism and stasis, reflected by Samuel Beckett and the nouveau roman, and in other ways in the fiction of Malcolm Lowry and Thomas Mann and the repetitive chronologies of Joyce Cary, Lawrence Durrell and others. After the 1960s, authors such as Muriel Spark confronted the Holocaust and recent history more directly, as in later decades did Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Graham Swift and others. In this fiction, and generally later in the century, concerns with the clock’s constraints were diminished by long familiarity and by several new factors. These included technologies of film, video, globalised media and the internet, along with increased international travel and encounters with less industrialised cultures. Science fiction, too, and imagination of time-travel, was both symptomatic yet partly redemptive of horological stress. There remained, however, numerous (often historical) novels by authors such as Gabriel García Marquéz, Salman Rushdie, Alasdair Gray and Thomas Pynchon – re-examining, in Mason & Dixon, C18th practices of global measurement – still concerned with the stresses clockwork chronology imposed on modern history.

This chapter explores magazines issued during 1948, during the period of austerity imposed by the post-war Labour government. Its focus is how Woman’s Weekly supported its readers through continuing shortages and rationing, by offering practical help and escapism. Discussing the magazine’s responses to austerity, it formulates the lower-middle-class status of its target audience in party-political terms: notably, Woman’s Weekly is less critical of government policy than middle-middle-class Good Housekeeping, acknowledging a less wealthy readership that benefitted under Labour. The following topics are discussed: housework and the British Housewives’ League, wedding etiquette, travel fiction, Christian Dior’s New Look fashions, and the extent to which the magazine supports working readers, including working wives. Comparison is made to fiction by Marghanita Laski and Mary Stewart.

Chapter Eleven discusses comics that look back at American political history through presidential allohistories—fictionalized, reimagined, or reinterpreted versions of historical record in forms that can be considered speculative fiction. The chapter primarily focuses on several “punk” histories: steampunk, dieselpunk, and biopunk accounts of wartime presidents and eras: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and the Cold War of Franklin Roosevelt through Lyndon Johnson. It argues that nostalgia plays a large role in the shape of these accounts, and in current political debates, continuing to reinforce the American presidency as an inherently White, masculine, institution.

This chapter explores Leontiev's early forays into fiction writing and literary criticism. It also takes a look at Leontiev's studies at Moscow University and his later involvement in the Crimean War. The chapter shows how Leontiev's first forays into literary criticism found as little resonance as had his first attempts at fiction. However, it takes a longer perspective on Leontiev's writings, revealing that his works about what is beautiful in art found resonance in the “aesthetic” movement in Russian art at the start of the twentieth century. The aesthetic movement has been defined as “a late nineteenth-century movement that championed pure beauty and ‘art for art's sake’.” There could be no better summary of the stance taken by Konstantin Nikolaevich Leontiev in his disputes with the “denunciatory” school in Russian letters. As with much else in his life, Leontiev was vindicated by events, even if he did not live to see them.